When you purchase a three-year extended warranty on a product, you might assume that means you're covered for three years. But it may not always work quite that way, as one reader discovered with an extended warranty he purchased from Sharper Image along with the popular iRobot Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. "Last fall my wife and I purchased an iRobot Roomba at a Sharper Image store," the reader wrote. "At the sa When you purchase a three-year extended warranty on a product, you might assume that means you’re covered for three years. But it may not always work quite that way, as one reader discovered with an extended warranty he purchased from Sharper Image along with the popular iRobot Roomba robot vacuum cleaner.“Last fall my wife and I purchased an iRobot Roomba at a Sharper Image store,” the reader wrote. “At the same time we also purchased for $49.95 an extended warranty for three years from Sharper Image. I generally think that extended warranties are not a good buy, but my thinking was that the technology is pretty new, so something may go wrong. Also, Sharper Image told us that with this warranty, we could exchange the old ROOMBA for a new one at any time, and they specifically told us that the software may get updated, and we could use the exchange program to run the latest software.”A few weeks ago, less than a year after they purchased the Roomba, it developed a problem. “When it hits a wall, it would not circle to the left, which means that it would frequently halt its cleaning, sound the alarm, and stop — thinking it was stuck. Our first thought was what a blessing it was that we had an extended warranty. That thought lasted until we arrived at the Sharper Image store, where they informed us that if they fixed this problem under warranty, it would invalidate the rest of the warranty term. Since we had been through less than 12 months of the three-year warranty, I thought this behavior was pretty outrageous. So much for the ‘three-year’ warranty …” Sharper Image would replace the broken Roomba with a new one under the warranty, but the warranty itself would cease unless they bought a new one. “Even though the original salesman had hyped it as an extended warranty, it is really a replacement warranty, good for one free replacement up to the three years,” the reader wrote. “I asked what would happen if we took home the new Roomba and it was broken right out of the box, and they said it’s covered by a 60-day warranty.”The reader chose to take the new Roomba and pay $35 for a new two-year warranty on it. “I figure getting a new Roomba every two years for $35 is worth the expense,” he wrote. “Or you can look at it as I paid $35 to have my broken Roomba repaired, even though it was under warranty. But I think it is pretty sad that we paid for three years and were then forced to turn it in after eleven months and pay for another warranty.”Read and post comments about this story here. Technology Industry